What Is Hospitality? An Unfinished Relationship That Begins with One Person

To face the one person in front of you completely, to grasp the real troubles and problems they carry, and to give yourself over to resolving them.

This ought to be an ordinary part of being human. Yet in reality, many people today no longer see the person right in front of them, because they are dazzled by a faceless crowd that does not actually exist behind that person. It is a debt our civilization has run up, first through the golden age of newspapers, magazines, manga, games, and television, and then through the spread of smartphones and social media. I sense that people are now splitting sharply into two camps, and what has torn open the chasm between them is algorithms and AI pushed too far.

On one side are those who can see one single person completely. On the other are those who treat the person in front of them carelessly and let themselves be dragged along by the many. In my view, the second type is most visible among people who have given in to self-interest and who chase style rather than depth or substance, and such people tend to look outside themselves for answers. The first type, by contrast, can see the person before them completely, and in the place where a relationship with that person comes into being, they give everything they are capable of in that very moment. I have kept watching such people, trying to understand how they manage it, and I have come to believe it is because they do not look for answers outside. They sharpen what is inside.

This theme will surely draw attention again in the years ahead, but whenever I think about it, I remember a restaurant I have been going to faithfully for nine years. Just two people run it, a young chef and the okami, the proprietress who receives the guests, and what struck me as remarkable happened on my very first visit. The moment I picked up my chopsticks, the okami noticed that I was left-handed, and without a word she rearranged the entire setting for a left-handed diner. To look at another person and attend to them without being told anything, and to do it naturally, how many people in the world can do that? A place like this does not change no matter how many years pass, and astonishingly, the food has never once declined.

Because competition in today’s restaurant business is so fierce, many owners forget their convictions along the way and rush toward expansion and efficiency, and that is often what decides whether they succeed or fail. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, but regulars who have come for years can tell at a glance, through the look of the place and the taste of the food, that the owner has changed. This restaurant, which will reach its tenth year next year, has never wavered once. It has not done what famous restaurants in the cities have done, turning toward foreign tourists with foreign money in their pockets, ceasing to look at the faces of their regulars, and putting profit first. It has never been featured in the media, and it has no social media at all.

It stands in exactly the opposite position from the manners of our time, yet there can be few places in Japan today where every visit brings food that moves you so deeply.

The hearts of a chef and an okami who “see one single person” are reflected in the place itself. Over the years they soak down through everything, the noren curtain at the entrance, the bearing of the room, the gestures, the taste, until at last they enfold it all. This, surely, was the richness and the beauty that Japan once possessed. The chef trained at one of the finest ryotei in the Kansai region, so his cooking is naturally superb, but what he inherited from that ryotei and treasures above all is his ledger of guests. It is a thick paper book holding nine years of history, in which every dish he has served to every guest since the day he opened, along with each guest’s tastes, is recorded in fine handwriting. He says it matters more to him than his own life. He once told me that when he realized he had left it at home, he asked the okami to go all the way back to his house to fetch it.

It reminds me that in the old days, when an earthquake struck, the eel shop would carry out its secret sauce and the merchant would carry out the ledger of customers. We need to remember once again that what truly mattered, more than money or property, was the recorded history of one’s relationship with one’s customers. He says he has never shown the ledger to anyone. In his restaurant flows a kind of time, inefficient and unexpanding, that can never be tasted in our overextended present. And the “Japanese hospitality” that we have forgotten dwells there.

I define hospitality as “an unfinished relationship that begins with facing one single person.” Service presupposes a relationship of one to many, and that “one” must, moreover, be replaceable. Hospitality, on the other hand, is one to one, and neither “one” can be replaced. Service has a correct answer, determined by society or by the times, and the provider stages satisfaction by passing that correct answer on to the customer. Hospitality has no correct answer.

That is because hospitality rests on the premise that every single person is different. For this reason, the world of hospitality is not a loose relationship. It is the relationship of host and guest, and at the same time a relationship of adversaries. In fact, one root of the word hospitality is the Latin hostis, meaning enemy. But the enemy here means the stranger, the outsider. The English word hostile later took on the character of animosity, yet originally there was a world in which, precisely because the one you faced was an enemy different from yourself, you welcomed them with your whole heart.

So while service can be judged as good or bad, hospitality is a harsh world in which one wrong step leads straight to death. You do not need to steel yourself to provide a service, but in hospitality you cannot let your guard down for a single moment. You grasp ahead of time what the person before you truly wants, you prepare it, and you offer it. In other words, there is never a moment to relax.

The tea ceremony is that spirit refined into culture. It is hard to imagine from the tea ceremony of today, but it was once a practice for people who lived in a world where their lives were at stake. For those who stood every day at the edge between life and death, drinking a single bowl of tea was a moment of rest, and at the same time a merciless moment in which their everyday state of mind was laid bare. So if you lived selfishly the rest of the time and tried to behave differently only on the day of the tea gathering, the gap in a heart that was merely dressed up would be cruelly exposed in the tearoom. The contest had been decided before you ever entered the room. That is exactly why tea masters and samurai disciplined body and mind every day, and stayed ready for the moment when it would come.

Tea masters such as Joo Takeno and Sen no Rikyu, whose roots lay among the merchants of Sakai, faced head-on the samurai, merchants, and missionaries who lived in a world contending for the next era’s supremacy, and they prepared a bowl of tea in rooms where enemies sometimes sat face to face. Tea in that age was not an accomplishment to be learned or a mark of cultivation, as it is now. It was, quite literally, a world in which a single mistake could mean seppuku. It is telling that Sen no Rikyu, regarded as the founder of the tea ceremony, was ordered by Hideyoshi Toyotomi to commit seppuku even though he was not a samurai. The skill of a tea master who could quiet his spirit in the very center of swirling intrigue and face his guest is beyond imagining.

At the same time, Japanese tea has its source in a tea that reflected the thought of Zen monks of the Ming dynasty. Tea is not a mere indulgence. It is the highest form of cultural capital, born of a margin in the heart that lets you welcome the person before you while watching them completely in that moment, without ever losing yourself. In that moment, the line between friend and enemy disappears, and you arrive at a state where opposites coexist. This was the true heart that drew the samurai so deeply to the way of tea.

In time, the tea ceremony split into schools, clung to their own styles, and hardened into empty form. This happened because it chose not to carry on the predecessors’ act of serving tea but to systematize a set of rules called etiquette. The moment it turned its eyes toward comparison with other schools, the guest’s face vanished from the bowl of tea being prepared for the guest in front of you. It entered a barren age of competing over the number of disciples and the number of tea gatherings, and the tea ceremony gradually lost the act of “seeing one single person.”

Such things happen often, and not only in tea. But what we should look at again in all the things we call “traditional culture” is not the desperate defense of culture that survives as form. It is the culture that has no form, because that is where the true Japanese culture lies, the culture our predecessors nurtured and handed down.

What dies out, dies out, and what remains, remains. That is certainly one truth. But when we look not at such outcomes but at the traces of the thought behind them, we will feel the hands of a clock that has stood still for 160 years begin to move again.